Debian Weekly News - December 16th, 2003

Welcome to this year's 50th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Finally, the website CVS repository was resurrected,
but the website can still not be updated. Chris Halls announced that he and René Engelhard have verified all recent changes in the
OpenOffice.org CVS repository. Christoph Berg proposed to
call the experimental distribution "scud", which is the name of Sid's dog that
broke toys even worse than Sid did.

New Features in APT-RPM. Joey Hess noticed an
article that described features
in apt-rpm that are not available with plain
apt-get. Some of them would be nice to have as well. The most
interesting feature is to install local files but automatically satisfy the
dependencies through network download if required.

Installer Status Report. Joey Hess reported that there are so many installation reports that the
developers have not managed to follow up on them all as of yet. He added that
the big focus for the next beta release will be on ports and translations. A
lot of work has begun to port the debian-installer to more
architectures, but most of these are nowhere near working.

Public X Strike Force Repositories. Branden Robinson announced the availability of anonymous, read-only, public access to the X
Strike Force Subversion repositories via the Subversion protocol. Write access is
restricted to people with SSH access to the host. Branches include XFree86
4.1.0, 4.2.1 and 4.3.0.

XFS Support in Debian Installer? Gunnar Wolf wondered if
the debian-installer should support XFS since it will be included into future releases
of Linux 2.4. Joey Hess added that
once the stock Debian kernel contains XFS, support can trivially be added to
the debian-installer.

Daily Debian-Installer Builds.
Martin Sjögren
announced
that he has restarted
daily builds of
the debian-installer for the x86
architecture.
Older builds were removed because he didn't have time to
verify their integrity.

New Debian Stable Update CDs. After Ingo Saitz noticed that
the update CD was broken, Steve McIntyre created new
images and jigdo files that should be available in the usual places soon. He
added a README file that explains why there have been two image files with the
same name.

Dependencies to lower Priorities? Marc Haber asked if
it should be allowed for packages to depend on others with lower priorities.
Not allowing this makes CD creation easier, but modern tools can follow the
dependencies on their own. Bastian Blank explained
that parsing the entire Packages files during the basic
installation would require at least 6 MB additional memory.

Debian AMD64 FAQ. Bart Trojanowski pointed
out the Wiki
resource on this port and mentioned the FAQ that some
people build there. Additionally the developers have discussed
how to implement the mixture of 32-bit and 64-bit libraries.

Naming the BSD Ports. Joel Baker reported that
he was approached by a member of the NetBSD team, who expressed that "Debian
GNU/KNetBSD" is a better name for the port than "Debian GNU/NetBSD". Robert
Millan pointed
out that a lot programs are using uname for system
identification when they're primarily checking for libc features. Hence, the
name needs to be selected carefully. Joel added the final naming scheme
later.

Writing Copyright Files. Peter Palfrader discovered
several badly written copyright files by new maintainers and many by old
maintainers. They lack information about the copyright owner, the particular
license and does not say that the software is licensed under a particular
license. He then wrote a guideline on how to properly phrase a copyright file that contains all
required information. Developers should also read Andrew Suffield's mail on
what you should do when writing a copyright file.

Debian Spain founded. Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña reported
that a legal Spanish Debian organisation has been founded during DebConf-ES by more than
20 people. The organization still needs to be approved by the Spanish
Internal Affairs Ministry, though. Once this is done it could also be a way
to collect donations for the Debian project in Spain, to defend the Debian
trademark and to register the debian.es domain.

Collaboration between Debian and KDE Developers. Several
Debian and KDE developers announced a strategic proposal for closer collaboration
between UserLinux and KDE projects. The strategy
consists of KDE core enterprise enhancements, UserLinux installer and system
tools, FreeDesktop.org and GNOME/GTK+ integration and OpenOffice.org and
Mozilla integration.

Using tmpfs as default? Masanori Goto (後藤 正徳)
proposed to
use tmpfs from Linux 2.4 in the default sarge installation which was discussed
long ago already. Roger Leigh added that
a size limit should be added since it is much nicer to get ENOSPC than a
kernel panic.

Providing a graphical WWW Browser. René Engelhard suggested
using the virtual package x-www-browser for all graphical web
browsers. Then other packages could suggest or recommend a graphical browser
while the user can select one among them. He would also like to add this one
to the list of virtual
packages.

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